# Frequently asked questions

## What issues can you help with in your issue tracker?

The primary purpose of our issue tracker is to enable us to identify and resolve bugs and feature requests in `cryptography`, so any time a user files a bug, we start by asking: Is this a `cryptography` bug, or is it a bug somewhere else?

That said, we do our best to help users to debug issues that are in their code or environments. Please note, however, that there’s a limit to our ability to assist users in resolving problems that are specific to their environments, particularly when we have no way to reproduce the issue.

Lastly, we’re not able to provide support for general Python or Python packaging issues.

## I cannot suppress the deprecation warning that `cryptography` emits on import

Hint

The deprecation warning emitted on import does not inherit `DeprecationWarning` but inherits `UserWarning` instead.

If your pytest setup follows the best practices of failing on emitted warnings (`filterwarnings = error`), you may ignore it by adding the following line at the end of the list:

    ignore:Python 2 is no longer supported by the Python core team. Support for it is now deprecated in cryptography, and will be removed in a future release.:UserWarning

Note: Using `cryptography.utils.CryptographyDeprecationWarning` is not possible here because specifying it triggers `import cryptography` internally that emits the warning before the ignore rule even kicks in.

Ref: https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest/issues/7524

The same applies when you use `filterwarnings()` in your code or invoke CPython with `-W` command line option.

## `cryptography` failed to install!

If you are having issues installing `cryptography` the first troubleshooting step is to upgrade `pip` and then try to install again. For most users this will take the form of `pip install -U pip`, but on Windows you should do `python -m pip install -U pip`. If you are still seeing errors after upgrading and trying `pip install cryptography` again, please see the Installation documentation.

## How does `cryptography` compare to NaCl (Networking and Cryptography Library)?

While `cryptography` and NaCl both share the goal of making cryptography easier, and safer, to use for developers, `cryptography` is designed to be a general purpose library, interoperable with existing systems, while NaCl features a collection of hand selected algorithms.

`cryptography`’s recipes layer has similar goals to NaCl.

If you prefer NaCl’s design, we highly recommend PyNaCl, which is also maintained by the PyCA team.

## Why use `cryptography`?

If you’ve done cryptographic work in Python before you have likely encountered other libraries in Python such as M2Crypto, PyCrypto, or PyOpenSSL. In building `cryptography` we wanted to address a few issues we observed in the legacy libraries:

- Extremely error prone APIs and insecure defaults.

- Use of poor implementations of algorithms (i.e. ones with known side-channel attacks).

- Lack of maintenance.

- Lack of high level APIs.

- Lack of PyPy and Python 3 support.

- Absence of algorithms such as `AES-GCM` and `HKDF`.

## Why does `cryptography` require Rust?

`cryptography` uses OpenSSL (see: Use of OpenSSL) for its cryptographic operations. OpenSSL is the de facto standard for cryptographic libraries and provides high performance along with various certifications that may be relevant to developers. However, it is written in C and lacks memory safety. We want `cryptography` to be as secure as possible while retaining the advantages of OpenSSL, so we’ve chosen to rewrite non-cryptographic operations (such as ASN.1 parsing) in a high performance memory safe language: Rust.

## `cryptography` raised an `InternalError` and I’m not sure what to do?

Frequently `InternalError` is raised when there are errors on the OpenSSL error stack that were placed there by other libraries that are also using OpenSSL. Try removing the other libraries and see if the problem persists. If you have no other libraries using OpenSSL in your process, or they do not appear to be at fault, it’s possible that this is a bug in `cryptography`. Please file an issue with instructions on how to reproduce it.

## Installing cryptography with OpenSSL 0.9.8, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.1.0 fails

The OpenSSL project has dropped support for the 0.9.8, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.1.0 release series. Since they are no longer receiving security patches from upstream, `cryptography` is also dropping support for them. To fix this issue you should upgrade to a newer version of OpenSSL (1.1.1 or later). This may require you to upgrade to a newer operating system.

## Installing `cryptography` fails with `error: Can not find Rust compiler`

Building `cryptography` from source requires you have Rust installed and available on your `PATH`. You may be able to fix this by upgrading to a newer version of `pip` which will install a pre-compiled `cryptography` wheel. If not, you’ll need to install Rust. Follow the instructions to ensure you install a recent Rust version.

Rust is only required during the build phase of `cryptography`, you do not need to have Rust installed after you’ve built `cryptography`. This is the same as the C compiler toolchain which is also required to build `cryptography`, but not afterwards.

## I’m getting errors installing or importing `cryptography` on AWS Lambda

Make sure you’re following AWS’s documentation either for building .zip archives for Lambda or building container images for Lambda.

## Why are there no wheels for my Python3.x version?

Our Python3 wheels are `abi3` wheels. This means they support multiple versions of Python. The `abi3` wheel can be used with any version of Python greater than or equal to the version it specifies. Recent versions of `pip` will automatically install `abi3` wheels.

## Why can’t I import my PEM file?

PEM is a format (defined by several RFCs, but originally RFC 1421) for encoding keys, certificates, and others cryptographic data into a regular form. The data is encoded as base64 and wrapped with a header and footer.

If you are having trouble importing PEM files, make sure your file fits the following rules:

- has a one-line header like this: `-----BEGIN [FILE TYPE]-----` (where `[FILE TYPE]` is `CERTIFICATE`, `PUBLIC KEY`, `PRIVATE KEY`, etc.)

- has a one-line footer like this: `-----END [FILE TYPE]-----`

- all lines, except for the final one, must consist of exactly 64 characters.

For example, this is a PEM file for a RSA Public Key:

    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEA7CsKFSzq20NLb2VQDXma
    9DsDXtKADv0ziI5hT1KG6Bex5seE9pUoEcUxNv4uXo2jzAUgyRweRl/DLU8SoN8+
    WWd6YWik4GZvNv7j0z28h9Q5jRySxy4dmElFtIRHGiKhqd1Z06z4AzrmKEzgxkOk
    LJjY9cvwD+iXjpK2oJwNNyavvjb5YZq6V60RhpyNtKpMh2+zRLgIk9sROEPQeYfK
    22zj2CnGBMg5Gm2uPOsGDltl/I/Fdh1aO3X4i1GXwCuPf1kSAg6lPJD0batftkSG
    v0X0heUaV0j1HSNlBWamT4IR9+iJfKJHekOqvHQBcaCu7Ja4kXzx6GZ3M2j/Ja3A
    2QIDAQAB
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----

## What happened to the backend argument?

`cryptography` stopped requiring the use of `backend` arguments in version 3.1 and deprecated their use in version 36.0. If you are on an older version that requires these arguments please view the appropriate documentation version or upgrade to the latest release.

Note that for forward compatibility `backend` is still silently accepted by functions that previously required it, but it is ignored and no longer documented.

## Will you upload wheels for my non-x86 non-ARM64 CPU architecture?

Maybe! But there’s some pre-requisites. For us to build wheels and upload them to PyPI, we consider it necessary to run our tests for that architecture as a part of our CI (i.e. for every commit). If we don’t run the tests, it’s hard to have confidence that everything works – particularly with cryptography, which frequently employs per-architecture assembly code.

For us to add something to CI we need a provider which offers builds on that architecture, which integrate into our workflows, has sufficient capacity, and performs well enough not to regress the contributor experience. We don’t think this is an insurmountable bar, but it’s also not one that can be cleared lightly.

If you are interested in helping support a new CPU architecture, we encourage you to reach out, discuss, and contribute that support. We will attempt to be supportive, but we cannot commit to doing the work ourselves.